Donald Trump’s GOP Establishment Has Failed

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

 

If they have any intention of turning around their party’s increasingly moribund fortunes, Republican voters must respond to last night’s profoundly disappointing midterm-election result by telling the Republican establishment to pound sand.

 

That’s right: It is time for Donald Trump to go.

 

I’m not being cute: Trump is the Republican establishment now. He’s the default, the Man, the swamp. It is Trump who is widely considered the front-runner for the party’s nomination in 2024. It is Trump whose endorsements are treated as if they were official edicts. It is Trump to whom the press and the public tend to link all GOP nominees. And, judging by the squeals that emanated from his allies yesterday, Trump’s machine intends to do everything it can to keep it that way, and to thus ensure that he wins the next primary election and loses the next presidential election. With the country in its present state, Republicans simply cannot afford that sort of frivolous, low-energy, old-boys-club complacency. GOPe, you’re on notice.

 

A few days ago, Trump started criticizing Ron DeSantis. A day or two later, Trump started threatening DeSantis. “I think if he runs,” Trump said, “he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly. I don’t think it would be good for the party.” Upping the ante, Trump then pretended that he knew “things” about DeSantis “that won’t be very flattering,” and promised to reveal them if DeSantis even considered challenging him in 2024.

 

This is classic establishment gate-keeping. It is also richly undeserved. Trump is a loser. He squeaked past the most unpopular woman in America in 2016, he presided over a blue wave in 2018, he lost to a barely breathing Joe Biden in 2020, and he hand-picked a bevy of losing Republican nominees in 2022. Ron DeSantis is a winner. He beat the Democratic wave in 2018, he got the biggest challenge of the last four years — the Covid-19 pandemic — almost exactly right, and he won reelection by the largest margin achieved by any Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida’s 177-year-history. Perhaps, on the internet, “loser lambasts winner” is an interesting story. In the real world, it is not.

 

Trump rose to prominence by criticizing what he perceived to be the “managed decline” of the Republican Party. The GOP’s candidates, Trump and his acolytes insisted back in 2015, were guilty of “failure theater” and of “running to lose.” These charges now attach perfectly to Trump and his loyalists. Don Bolduc? Failure theater. Dr. Oz? Failure theater. Doug Mastriano? Failure theater. Worse yet, Trump enjoys actively sabotaging the party’s viable prospects if they refuse to bend the knee. He tried to have Brian Kemp removed as governor of Georgia for the crime of telling the truth about the 2020 election. He tried to destroy the Republican Senate candidate in Colorado — a candidate whose victory would have helped the GOP govern if it wins in 2024 — because that candidate wasn’t sufficiently sycophantic toward him. The mere prospect of being wildly attacked by him kept terrific candidates such as Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, and Pat Toomey out of the Senate races in their states. Now, he is threatening to make up lies about Governor DeSantis if DeSantis doesn’t acquiesce to his wishes. These days, Trump isn’t a rebel; he’s the boss. But he’ll only remain the boss for as long as Republican voters allow him to.

 

And, going forward, why on earth would they do that? The core conceit undergirding Trump’s position at the head of the party has long been that, unlike others, he wins. Sure, his apologists say, he may be crude and ill-disciplined and unpredictable and rough, but he’s the party’s only hope of keeping out the Democrats; he and he alone has shown that he can do that. Now, this is no longer true — if it ever was. Because of Trump, Joe Biden is the president of the United States. Because of Trump, John Fetterman will be a U.S. senator. Because of Trump, the two runoff elections in Georgia in 2021 yielded two Democratic senators, which yielded the American Rescue Plan, which yielded turbocharged inflation. Because of Trump, the Republican Party found itself unable to capitalize on a huge midterm opportunity to send the Democrats the stinging rebuke that they so richly deserved.

 

Donald Trump? Yeah, I remember that guy.